15 YO Attempts to Mug a Cop with Fake Gun, Gets Shot - First Degree Murder?!

Off Topic Politics and World Issues
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I thought I’d tell you guys about something that happened here in Italy a few weeks ago and hear your opinions.

We’re in Naples, city in southern Italy, among those with the highest crime rates and with the strongest mafia presence.

It’s 3am, and a 23 year old off-duty cop is sitting in his car with his girlfriend. Two guys, one 15yo and the other 17, approach the car on a motorcycle. The 15yo gets off the bike, points a gun to the officer’s head and tells him to get his Rolex watch off his writs and submit it to him.

The officer tells him to desist, and informs the 15yo kid he’s a cop and is armed. The mugger racks his gun and threatens to shoot him. It’s at that point that the officer takes out his gun and shoots the mugger in the chest.

Another shot is fired, and hits the kid in the back of his head. The dynamics about this second shot are still object of investigation.

The other criminal, who was still on the bike, flees. An ambulance is called for the guy that got shot and he’s transported to the emergency room. By the time he gets there, he’s dead. The gun the mugger was holding is also found to be a fake gun.

Shortly after informing the parents of the mugger about the events that took place, tens of relatives of his rush to the emergency room and start destroying everything. The reason? Nurses and doctors didn’t do a good job and weren’t able to save the teen’s life. They devastated the emergency room to the point it had to be closed to public for a whole day to be restored.

The next day, a few guys with their faces hidden showed up on their motorcycles outside of a police barrack, and started firing shots in the air, then left.

What’s interesting about these happenings is that the cop is now being looked into and he might be up to A LOT of jail time.

Initially, the crime of “excess of self-defense” was hypothesized. However, he is now being investigated for “voluntary murder”, which is the equivalent of what I’ve heard being called first-degree murder in the US.

The laws in Italy are mind-blowing. There are no “stand your ground” rules, and if someone breaks into your house you are allowed to shoot only if there is immediate danger for you or someone else in the house. In no instance are you allowed to shoot a fleeing target, even if they’re armed and are still endangering you.
“Self-defense” is an instance in which all charges are dropped if you kill someone in a similar context, but it’s seldom conceeded by judges: you have to prove beyond any doubts that the only option other than shooting was your own death.

Even then, “excess of self-defense” might be decided on: you acted to defend yourself but did it unproportionally so.

There have been lots of cases in which someone who was mugged or robbed denfeded himself and it resulted in the death of the aggressor, and the victim later had to indemnify the aggressor’s family.

Personally, I think it’s mind blowing that the cop is even been tried for a crime at all–After verifying his version of the events, I think all charges should have been dropped.

You cannot count on someone doing always and only the right thing to do as little harm as possible when you have a gun pointed at their head.
I think the Italian laws do way, way too much to safeguard criminials and leave victims short on justfice way too often.

Source (in ltalian):

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Yeah, I don’t see how they can justify charging him. What do they want him to do, give the kid his gun?

When I was 16 I once had the SWAT team come for me because I was playing with a cap gun that looked sort of real and didn’t have the red thing on the end. I thought it was a bit of an overreaction, but the message is that playing around with fake guns has the potential to get you shot with real bullets.

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In Italy, they will sacrifice a cop in order to keep the peace.

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That’s insane. In the U.S. the cop is totally in the clear and the other criminal who fled would be charged with felony murder if caught probably.

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Why would this be the case?

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In the us if someone is killed during the commission of a felony, all persons participating in that felony are potentially liable of murder.

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U.S. not us… sorry about that.

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That’s interesting. Something like that would sound alien in Italy.

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I really hope the relatives who came in and trashed the place didn’t cough on anybody.

In all seriousness though, that sounds messed up. I don’t know what happened, obviously, but it sure doesn’t sound like the cop was in the wrong.

Sometimes dumb stuff happens. My friend stole a few grams of weed from a dealer, was chased down and ran off the road. He died, along with his little brother and another friend. The attacker received 60 days in the county jail.

I also know a 13 year old who was messing around with a loaded gun with his friend and accidentally shot him in the chest. Dumb? Reckless? Irresponsible? Absolutely. He called 911 immediately and was found attempting to do CPR and was sentenced to 15 years in prison (or whatever it’s called for teens).

I hope that cop gets off if he’s innocent but it sure seems like the punishments don’t often match the crime (or in his case, lack of one).

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The rationale will be that, first off, the cop shouldn’t have been wearing an expensive watch in Naples and that he should have just given it up because killing someone over a watch is wrong.

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Do you realize what this means though?

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Lorenzo Insigne was robbed in Naples. Tardelli said he should have known better than to go out wearing expensive jewelry. It’s the South and they think differently. People will steal your stuff and the cops will tell you where to go to buy it back.

I don’t like it. I remember as a kid when I asked my father what the mafia was and he said a bunch of people who don’t want to work. Thieves were considered as bad as Gypsies.

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Let’s not forget the cop in this story was literally sitting in his car. He wasn’t going around with his arm raised in the air to show everybody how rich he was.

This sounds a lot like what people say when a girl gets raped and they’ll go, “she shouldn’t have been dressed like that though.”

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I had to use an English to Italian translator on google to read the posted link. I found one or two other links when I searched for the story. Has the Police Officer been charged with anything? As far as I know, all fatal shootings in the U.S. are going to be investigated like they’re murders until it’s determined otherwise. I also don’t whether “investigated for” means the same thing there that it does here.

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It’s Naples; it doesn’t need to make sense.

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Not yet. Our bureaucratic system is very slow. It might take years before we get to a sentence.

It doesn’t. The closest translation would be “to be suspected of.”

In Italian, to be investigated for a crime means that there’s an investigation going on that is meant to find whether you are guilty of a specific crime.

Edit:
I just looked it up to make sure I was making sense.

So basically, when you are suspected of a crime, your name is written into what’s called the register of suspects. It holds the names of all the people that are suspected of crimes that are currently under investigation.

Once a date for a trial in court is set, the suspect/investigated person is now said to be a defendant. That’s the difference basically. You are a defendant when a date is set. Until then, we say you are being investigated (on) for a crime.

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In some papers the thief is described as a baby-rapinatore. His father said the second shot was unnecessary. Since the cop is a carabiniere, technically a military police officer, he will probably be held to a higher standard than a regular cop.

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Yeah, but it’s not like what he says holds any weight. In an interview, the way he was speaking about his son made it look he was a little angel as well.

You’ll concur with me that a guy that is around at 3am with a fake gun mugging people for money to go to a night club (I forgot to put this into my original post) isn’t a good person.

The second shot might be the only reason why this cop is risking jail time. They have to carefully determine whether it was justified or not.

Apparently there’s recently been a witness that has stated that, as the cop first shot the guy in the chest, he fired back a blank shot with his fake gun. Under this hypothesis, it would make sense that the cop thought he was still in danger and reasonably fired again. How would you tell a blank shot from a missed one in such a situation? Let’s not forget about adrenaline.

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He comes from a family of criminals but supposedly they don’t belong to a clan. It’s possible nothing will happen to the cop. There is supposed to be video and it will all hinge on that second shot. From what I’ve read, it was in the back of the head. That could be bad news for a cop in America, not just Italy.

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Correct. I hope the video will be enough to clear whatever doubts.

Exactly. However, I’m not sure that should equate to the cop being at fault. Remember, he had a gun pointed to his head a few moments earlier, and he had supposedly heard what might very well have been an actual shot directed at him.

I don’t know if I’d be able to end a life, and I’ve never handled a gun so I’m absolutely conjecturing here, but if a person that had previously pointed a gun at me was even running away, I would feel safe. The cop was still in danger, or at least would have been if the gun had been a functioning one. It’s not a knife. A person distancing themselves from you is just as dangerous, if not more, as they’d be close to you when, they’re holding a gun.

What’s stopping a fleeing armed person to stop running, turning around, aiming and shooting?